cyberlaxamana

by Tiffany Niver   We don’t know what we want. Decades of psychology, economics, and sociology research has shown that people are quite poor at predicting what they want, how it will make them feel, and the long-term implications of gratification. This makes ground-breaking product innovations all the more complicated as understanding users becomes an exercise of mind-reading…and then some. Knowing the limitations of consumer insights and going into the process with a healthy sense of skepticism can empower creativity in coming up with the most impactful tests and analyses. The key to getting great consumer information is focusing on obtaining as much behavioral insight as possible, while following the lean start-up principle of “maximizing learning for unit of time and effort expended.” Many entrepreneurs and researchers follow a fairly standard path of gaining customer insights. Baselining Through Consumer Self-Reporting : Before any development or investment begins, they r...

by Samantika Gokhale Last year, The Sims creator, Will Wright, launched a new online TV show “Bar Karma” which invited a community of fans to drive the show’s content. Users could pitch one-line story concepts using an online tool, members would vote on the ideas, and the most popular plots would be made into a 30-minute episode produced by a professional cast and crew. A start-up which focused so strongly on user-centric design must have been a hit series, right? Wrong. The show flopped and is now ancient history. Lean start-up theory encourages entrepreneurs to launch early, put a minimum viable product into the hands of real customers, learn quickly about how they use it, and iterate the business model based on their feedback. However, the problem with listening to your users is that they can often be unreliable. They may not actually know what they want until you show it to them. They may tell you what they think you want to hear. Their suggestions maybe skewed towards their experi...

by Evan Shore (republished from his personal blog ) Towards the end of our conversation, Jeff Immelt patted me on the back and said, “Interesting.” After I probed further, he continued, “It’s a good idea, and I think I can see the benefit. I just need to think more about it.” I wondered, as I did during the past several conversations with potential customers, how I could advance from hearing “interest ing ” to “interest ed .” CONTEXT: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY INTERVIEWS Several months ago, I set out on a quest to understand the specific pain-points that corporations face when it comes to Innovation. I interviewed the CEOs and C-Suite executives of over 40 companies. Most executives identified the same problem:  “The single greatest challenge for us is identifying and executing innovations outside the boundaries of our business models.” I had a vision for a new type of open innovation intermediary that stemmed from my exposure to  IDEO ,  Innocentive ,  Gen3 Partners , con...

by Rosemary Kendrick & Aleem Mawani It’s been, well, a very rewarding semester working on Rewardly.  As we reflect on the main tools we employed this semester—merchant interviews, business model generation, generating mockups, and developing a prototype—we have a few takeaways we’d like to share. First off, when it comes to interviewing local businesses , be prepared to throw enough darts .  Local business managers are tough to pin down with understandably ever-shifting schedules, so we found ourselves juggling a bunch of cancellations and rescheduling.  It’s helpful to remember that the customer discovery process is a sales process: you start with a lot of cold leads, eventually secure enough interviews, and then ultimately score a few letters of intent.  A corollary to the throw-enough-darts mantra is the realization that you don’t know what you don’t know.   It’s hard to predict which local businesses will be the most helpful to talk to, and it’s e...

by Lorin Pace & Iris Guerra In the new era of all things lean, fat gets a bad rap. Even the terminology is loaded; in the U.S. we are facing an obesity health crisis like nothing we have faced in our nation’s history. Of course no-one would want to be ‘fat’ when the term has such a negative connotation. But when did ‘fat’ become the only alternative to lean? What about medium or athletic builds? Painting a picture of two polarized options and demonizing the other is a storied psychological tactic for building momentum around your own philosophy. For better or for worse, Eric Ries has done a great job of depicting epic failure as the product of the ‘other’ approach. And he has a point. It IS senseless to build a product no one wants, and no one is a better example of that than Ries himself (he did it!) and he knows how painful it is to pour your heart and soul into something that ends up being discarded. Ries would have you believe that not only can you apply the lean start...

by Emeka Oguh Customer Discovery. I learned that customer discovery interviews are a very efficient way to capture the voice of the customer and assess demand for your product. I learned that I needed to develop an elevator pitch describing the purpose of my project when reaching out to interviewees. If interviewees were unclear on the purpose of my call they were hesitant and guarded on how they answered questions. I learned to phrase questions in the language of the customer. This is a simple but very powerful tool that helps create dialogue and increases the quality of the conversation. I learned that asking open‐ended questions instead of direct questions provided me with a lot of insight into things that I had never thought of. I also learned the effectiveness of warm leads, as interviewees were more willing to share information when introduced by a mutual friend than when cold called. When I did not have a warm lead to a person, I learned that flattery, e.g. reading their litera...

by Tawanda Sibanda Mukela Overview for Hotels from Mukela on Vimeo . I am the co-founder of an Africa-focused hotel reservation site called Mukela.com (mukela is derived from the Zulu word emukela, meaning welcome). Essentially, the site is hotels.com for the African hotel market. If you were to go to expedia.com and search for hotels in Harare, Zimbabwe only 5 hotels will be displayed. Our database, on the other hand, contains over 150 accommodation options in Harare alone. Western online travel agents only scratch the surface of accommodation in most African countries, and are overwhelmingly weighted towards the most luxurious. Mukela.com’s value proposition is to provide the intrepid traveler access to a wide spectrum of comfortable but more affordable mid-tier hotels. Why aren’t hotels.com and expedia.com adequately serving the African market? The hotel market in Africa is extremely fragmented with few hotel chains. Achieving broad coverage in the region requi...